I was working on what I thought would be a not-too-dirty and not-too-premature snippet of code to cache some rendered Django templates when I realized it was going to be more complicated and in fact a little uglier than what I'd hoped. "Oh well" I thought, and decided to move on to more critical tasks. First though, to go grab some popcorn (the radioactive looking yellow stuff from Popcorn Factory in case you're wondering).
Not surprisingly, while in the kitchen it hit me that I was thinking about the problem incorrectly and that the solution was at hand. Welcome back, quick psychological win! I assume most people are aware now of the consequences of distractions on productivity. Another part of being effective is changing your context (physical surroundings, environment, etc.). I suspect many of us with technical or creative careers overlook this important aspect.
Researchers still have a lot to piece together about how the different subsystems in our brains work together, but evid